Doorways and Signs

Rev Ellen Alston
We began this season with a focus on making space in time, within the days and hours and rhythm of our living: Sabbath – a time set apart, with an intentionally different perspective, so that we might be more aware of God’s ongoing presence and purpose for and with us. We bring all that we are to the welcoming embrace of the One who made us, who knows us, and who loves us more deeply than we can fathom. To honor Sabbath - indeed to lean into any of the spiritual disciplines - is to open ourselves to deepening and being made new in that very relationship. And so we have journeyed over 40days2gether with the book Mudhouse Sabbath, exploring practices and connecting points with our kindred faith and its roots, led by our sister in Christ and our sister in Abraham and Sarah. Dr. Lauren Winner and Rabbi Dr. Jana De Benedetti have beautifully helped us weave back and forth in the Judeo-Christian journey, and I, for one, am enriched by the discovery of doorways to adjacent rooms in these parallel and intertwining paths.
And this last stop, regarding doorposts and the mezuzot that mark them, is a fitting touchpoint for our culmination of these 40 days. For Easter itself takes us to another doorway, one that is supposedly sealed shut. It’s easy to assume that this is the end of the road – a dead end, in fact – and that all that weighs us down in failure, sin, doubt, and fear, would have the final word, would be the lasting truth that determines our next steps and entire future. But like the women who carried the heaviness of grief to the tomb, interrupting their own sorrow to wonder how on earth the immense stone could be moved aside so they could anoint Jesus’ lifeless body, we, too, are met in this new morning by an astounding truth - a message that bears attaching to and about every doorway from now until the culmination of all time: the stone is rolled away before we arrive, the tomb is empty, CHRIST IS RISEN and goes on ahead of us!!!
Attached to a doorway in the house where I live is a plaque that was a gift from a dear friend just before I moved here. Nearly 4 years ago, I put it here next to the doorway through which I would pass each day before leaving home, as a reminder and a blessing. I pray that wherever I may be on this journey, by God’s grace, something of this message would shine through my life, that I might be a sign of the open and empty tomb, an inviting doorway to the Risen Christ! Hallelujah! Risen indeed!